The Tao of Spartacus Jones

Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires

It's summer in the forest.
It hasn't rained in a good while and things are a little dry.

There's a madman with a big, big box of matches bolting here and there, striking matches and tossing them around, apparently willy-nilly.
Flames spring up.
You race to the scene and douse the flames, just in the nick of time.
Whew!

But wait.
There's another one!
Off you go, at a breakneck pace, desperately hoping to arrive in time to prevent the new fire from burning out of control.
Got it!
Another catastrophe avoided. Well done.

But wait...!

And on and on you go, racing from one new fire to another, putting each out in turn, just in time. Not TOO much damage done by any one little blaze, although it does start to add up, forest-wise. And playing catch-up takes its toll on you, too. You get tired. You get slower. You're running out of water.
The fires start to burn longer, cause more damage before you can get to them, before you can extinguish them. Each one looms terrifyingly closer to being out of control.

And all the while, the madman with his matches cavorts merrily on.
It really doesn't matter to him which particular trees he sets alight or which particular trees you manage to save, in whole or in part.
He doesn't care.
His goal is to burn down the entire forest and he's confident he'll succeed, eventually. He knows it's a whole lot easier to start a fire than to put one out. Sooner or later, you're going to get there later rather than sooner and you won't be able to prevent a conflagration of tragic proportions. It will rage until it runs out of forest to consume.

But wait...
Suppose we stop playing catch-up.
Suppose we stop trailing after this lunatic.
Suppose instead, we kick the proverbial shit out of him, take his matches away and lock his pyromaniac ass up in a little rubber room safely away from any and all combustible materials.

I don't pose this as a rhetorical question.
Because this is, more or less, our current situation, right here in the Good Ole US of A.
We've got George W. Bush et al tossing matches all over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Rule of Law in general. And we rally to defend Liberty against this incursion or that invasion or such-and-such abridgement until we're exhausted and running out of water.

Once again, we're playing catch-up — with impeachment.
Impeachment is a political process that's not only hard to get started, it's hard to get a conviction, and even if convicted, the only "punishment" that the "president" faces is removal from office.

What if we cut him off at the pass for a change, instead of trailing behind him, eating his dust?
Suppose we just skip this Marx Brothers Night at the Impeachment farce altogether and go right to indictment for any one of the innumerable felonies for which there is more than ample "probable cause" to assemble a grand jury and force them to suffer some of those awful five-dollar lunches.
It doesn't take a legal genius — hell, the parking lot attendant at the law school could probably make a RICO case against Bush and Company and not have to crack a textbook.

Surely, somewhere in this country there must be a D.A. with more gonads than God gave a gopher. I say we find him or her and help them to arrange a nice new "palace" for King George, far, far away from anything combustible.
Then we might indeed have a Republic that no one could match.